|
||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
|
|
||
|
|
|||
 |
|||
|
|||
|
|
||
What's New? | Faculty in the News |  News Archive | News Home
|
|
||
|
|||
|
|
Article by Jill Maxwell '07 Published in Wisconsin Women's Law Journal Leads to a Speaking Engagement and ABC Online Interview
The article, "Sexual Harassment at Home: Altering the Terms, Conditions, and Privileges of Rental Housing for Section 8 Recipients," offers unique policy initiatives and litigation strategies to remedy the problem of sexual harassment and coercion perpetrated by landlords against female tenants. The article was developed under the supervision of Professor Elizabeth M. Schneider to fulfill a requirement for her course, Women and the Law. Maxwell was invited to speak at a Wisconsin Women's Law Journal colloquium in February entitled, "Our Workplace, Our Home: Protecting Our Families and Preserving Our Dignity." She addressed an audience of law and women's studies students, and women's rights groups. She was also quoted in March in an ABCNews.com article, "Harassed at Home -- by Your Landlord: Landlords Prey on Poor Women by Extorting Sexual Favors in Lieu of Rent." The article describes the case of a Brooklyn woman who, with the assistance of the Fair Housing Justice Center, filed a civil rights complaint against her landlord for sexual harassment. In response to the complaint and additional investigations, the Attorney General filed a lawsuit against the landlord and the co-owners of three Brooklyn apartment buildings. While sexual harassment in housing has only recently begun to draw attention, there is nothing to suggest it is any less insidious than sexual harassment in the workplace. "Each year thousands of women are subjected to inappropriate sexual advances by their landlords - comments, touching, quid pro quo requests for sexual favors," Maxwell said. "The lower a woman's income, the more vulnerable she is, as she has fewer housing options. She may be forced to tolerate the situation or risk homelessness." The ideas for her article began germinating while Maxwell was working, from 2002-2004, as a paralegal at the Housing and Civil Enforcement Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C.. Many of the cases she worked on concerned the sexual harassment of female tenants in housing, which is recognized as a violation of the Fair Housing Act's prohibition on sex discrimination. All of the victims in these cases were poor and many of them received Section 8 housing choice vouchers, which are government subsidies for use in the private housing market. When Maxwell began taking Professor Schneider's class, she approached the professor with concepts for the paper, which had already taken shape in her mind. The professor and the class helped her, she said, "synthesize the feminist legal theory behind the issue, which is at the intersection of gender, economics, and, to some degree, race." Maxwell's article provides a starting point for reconceptualizing the role the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which administers the Federal Fair Housing Act and the Section 8 program, and Public Housing Authorities (PHAs) can have in decreasing the vulnerability of low-income women to sexual harassment. She also proposes ways to hold PHAs legally accountable when they are on notice of sexually harassing landlords and fail to take remedial measures. A graduate of Vassar College, Maxwell is an Edward V. Sparer Public Interest Law Fellow and a staff member of the Journal of Law and Policy. She is a CALI Award winner, a Prince Merit Scholar, and a 2006 Brooklyn Law Students for the Public Interest Fellow. She has had a wide range of experience in public interest law, including work as an intern at the U.S. Attorney's Office, Civil Division, EDNY, Legal Momentum, the Safe Harbor Project, and the South Brooklyn Legal Services. Maxwell's current mission is to find funding for a year-long project at the Fair Housing Justice Center. "The project would increase the organization's capacity to provide resources to victims of sexual harassment in housing in New York City - victims whose needs are otherwise largely unmet," she said. She will begin a clerkship for United States Magistrate Judge Kiyo A. Matsumoto for the Eastern District of New York in 2008. Read the ABCNews.com article that quotes Maxwell.
|
|
